Friday, February 18, 2005

Posted by
RFTR

More and LessAn editorial piece in the WSJ today makes points similar to those in the Michael Crichton lecture that I linked to on Wednesday, specifically that Global Warming science has been co-opted by politics. The resulting implication is importan: "The world is being lobbied to place a huge economic bet--as much as $150 billion a year--on the notion that man-made global warming is real. Businesses are gearing up, at considerable cost, to deal with a new regulatory environment; complex carbon-trading schemes are in the making. Shouldn't everyone look very carefully, and honestly, at the science before we jump off this particular cliff?"

Read the article to find out why they came to that conclusion. It's logical, but instead too many alarmists have decided that global warming is fact, with a sort of evangelical aggression—and the science suffers.

At the same time, CNN.com is perpetuating the junk, saying: "Studies looking at the oceans and melting Arctic ice leave no room for doubt that it is getting warmer, people are to blame, and the weather is going to suffer, climate experts have said."

Of course, the study in question does seem to prove that the earth is warming, beyond most doubts. Unfortunately, it has absolutely nothing to do with establishing the cause of that warming. In the press conference releasing the paper, yes, one of the scientists who wrote it claimed that there is no denying man's effect on the warming trend—unfortunately those are his opinions, not the content of his paper.

So why does CNN repeat the Reuters story based on nothing? It's a good question to which we'll probably never get an answer.